World

Letter from Oslo

July 29, 2011
Norway struggles to come to terms with the actions of the mostrous Anders Behring Breivik
Norway struggles to come to terms with the actions of the mostrous Anders Behring Breivik


It says something about Norway’s antipathy to ostentation that four days after Anders Behring Breivik murdered scores of teenagers on Utøya Island, one local near the killer’s house in Oslo worried that his countrymen had begun to become a little too proud of their stoic grief.

The reticence of this society created the perfect backdrop for the inscrutability of a man nobody suspected of conjuring up such a fantastical, perverted outlook. Even his physical features conspired to protect his imaginings and intentions. “Did you know him?” you ask neighbours who shared the same roads and shops. They shrug, “I might have seen him around. But he was tall and blonde. A lot of Norwegians are tall and blonde.”

Yet Breivik is the most un-Norwegian of men. No country can easily conceive of producing such a monster. But the scale of his deeds, and his glee in having carried them out, mark him out as the kind of poser scorned at every level of Norwegian society.

As his image now slips from the front pages of the world’s newspapers, Norwegians hope that his face and ideas might also dissolve back into obscurity. But the stories of the survivors and the dead render it impossible to remove the cause from the effect. Who is responsible for the grief of the terrified boy who found the shredded body of his brother in the woods? Whose years of planning warped the metal frames around the shattered windows of the government buildings in the centre of town?

For years this man was fetishising European racial war in the bedroom of his mother's flat. Yet here in Skøyen in the west of Oslo, only the occasional nod from a frustrated reporter tells you that this small suburb hides that horrible resonance. Breivik lived here in this innocuous flat with his mother for four years, yet nobody here knew him; nobody had seen him. The gymnasiums around the city are understandably unwilling to admit to his membership. Even those who might occasionally have stood behind him in a queue at the supermarket are unwilling to admit to the shame of having shared with him a foot of linoleum.

For the friends he names in that demented manifesto, and the family who knew nothing of his daily meticulous planning, the association is too much to bear. They have fled the city. All that is left are his words, and the image of his self-satisfied face as he is whizzed from the court to his solitary cell.